Narrative Game 03. - Hands!

And here I am with the third part of the prototype development! This part is about animation (procedural(code-based animation) and non-procedural) because the idea is to add some hand animation and movement to the screen, so the detective interacts with the objects on the table.

The procedural animations are handy if you want to have some kind of animation, but do not want to fix the characters or objects' position or rotation, so we are still able to move them around without any problem and without the need to recreate the animation again. The disadvantage on the other hand is that these kinds of animation are often pretty simple and robotic, nowhere close to being natural, but because the scope would be impossible with hand-made animation, we have to do the "easy" way.

As you can see, we got another visual update and additional models so the scene is pretty much populated with almost every object we need in this game. Only the detailed dioramas left (and textures, sounds, and more UI and...). Ohh and now we have a dialogue system too (made by another team member - Konstantin).

So far I added invisible (empty object) points to the objects the detective can move the hands to those positions and added a script to move the hand from A to B. So far the detective can move his arm to the sides of the diorama and swap the dioramas. Some additional animations are needed so it does not just move the static hand to the point but also moves the fingers so it looks like it grabs the objects.

The second interaction is with the characters on the diorama. When the dialogue starts with any characters, the player picks up the character with his right hand and the detective piece with the left hand and starts moving them up and down mimicking the talking, and when the dialogue is over, the pieces are placed back and the detective's hands move back to the side of the table (relaxed position).

In the second week, I continued working on the animation. Now the detective is able to interact with the telephone and the newspaper too. And now we have the hand gesture animations too so it is animated based on the object it interacts with (more or less, still a work in progress, but the non-script-based animations are not my work, I just have to enjoy them).

And for the dialogue, I added some black bars to the scene so it feels more cinematic and even move the lamp direction of the diorama giving the characters a spotlight and darkening the ambient lights, so the scene is more focused on the characters, and when the dialogue over the lamp rotates to the ceiling which increases the ambient light intensity.

These additions do not require high programming skills, but still, a long process to work out how to delay them, because we trying to focus on the immersion too, and for that, we have to queue up the transitions and animations and when everything is finished, the player can continue the gameplay.

Thank you for reading!